Service area business showing on Maps

[Christopher]

This is a general contractor that is showing their office address with directions. What is your opinion, does this need to be fixed to ?service area,? and if so how do I do that.

My initial thought as a Local Guide was to change the address, so I did that and used ?service area business? in place of the address so Google could see my intention, but I don?t think that is the right way.

From their website:
"Initial Contact
We come to your property and conduct an onsite walk-through to define the scope of our work and answer any questions you may have."

Thanks,
Chris

 

[Linda Buquet]

Hi Chris,

Depends. Is it an actual office or does he work from home?

If actual office he can show address IF the office open and is staffed during their business hours. If it's just the owner and he's usually out with clients it should be hidden.

If it's a home business then it really needs to be hidden.

Yes the way you did it is incorrect and could really hurt the company. The GMB guidelines state only the real & exact addresses can be used - no extra words or anything. So you should edit it back to exactly how the address was before.

So if as you say it's an office, it may not need to be hidden. They likely have clients come to their office on business sometimes too.

But if that's not the case, there is no way for you to hide it. It can only be hidden by the owner within the GMB dashboard.

Hope that helps and welcome to the group!

Added: Just checked their site and since they don't display address there that I can see, that may mean they don't have a public facing walk-in office.

 

[Christopher]

Linda,

Thanks for the warm welcome to the group. I really appreciate the contributions by members - tons of valuable information. I will chime in once in a while to share some knowledge or an opinion.

I deleted the 'address update' inside my Local Guides dashboard.

(All updates are confirmed by other Local Guides before made public, to prevent any damage to a local business.)

But after I suggested the update I remembered this awesome forum would be the place to get the answer I needed